“Enriched by reading the reviews” of other bloggers’ books is one of the ways I would characterize this year as well as reading your comments on mine.

Number 2 brings me to my plans for 2018. I am going to concentrate on what I would call the foundational classics I have not yet read, like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and books by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. I want to read Rebecca and find out why it is on so many top ten list of favorites. And maybe I’ll tackle a Woolf.

And I want to read some American foundational classics like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby Dick and books by Willa Cather and Henry James. Maybe do some traveling with Charley. Louisa May Alcott wrote so many other books besides Little Women…time to dust some off? And I want to find out more about Sarah Orne Jewett whose The Country of the Pointed Firs I so enjoyed in 2016.

Since I can’t deny my attraction to the 19th century, I am also going to read more historical fiction that takes place in that time period, so I have signed up for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Happy New Year! I really enjoyed Dracula and Northanger Abbey and I love Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca, so I hope you enjoy them too! Good luck with your challenges and even more importantly, happy reading! 🙂

They sound like good plans! Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights are some of my favourite classics and I love to see people discover them for the first time. Good luck with the historical fiction challenge too. I also find the 19th century fascinating, although I’m being increasingly drawn to earlier time periods in my reading.

I am also not much of a yearly recap person. Your favorite books of the year are some of my all time favorites. I have found that reading “Foundational Classics” to be very rewarding. So such of what has come since, in terms of literature and thought, stems form them. Have a happy New Year’s!

Ambitious but smart! Ambitious because you’ve taken on so many challenges (I seem to be heading towards just one, to read what I fancy at the time) but smart in that so many, as you say, overlap. (Though I fancy you’ll need to create an Excel sheet or two to organise it all!)

Anyway, I applaud your positivity in drawing a veil on the dying days of globe’s annus horribilis because, where 2017 is concerned, that way lies madness. Happy New Year, Laurie!